Design solution for the regular delivery of milk and milk products
Design Challenge
Company X wants to take organic milk and milk products to people. Daily needs like milk are critical every morning for a household and it is extremely important to have timely delivery as one’s schedule depends on these items.
Design a solution that caters to the regular delivery of milk and milk product needs of people, daily at their doorstep.
Assumptions
After a thorough understanding of the problem statement. I had lots of assumptions in my mind I wanted to address before moving ahead and to avoid misconceptions later, are as follows:
- Market study to validate the business idea/problem statement is not needed.
- Business goals are not needed to define.
- The solution has to be designed only for Indian consumers.
- The solution has to be designed only for Mobile (app) consumers. I have chosen Android due to having a larger consumer base in India.
- Company X will manage the inventory and delivery of the products.
Design Process
I am practising User-Centered Design framework/process for the past few years. This iterative design process I have developed by taking reference of IDEO’s & Stanford d.school’s Design Thinking Process. It helps in identifying and validating most critical business & users objectives, that also ensures to keep users and business stakeholders involved throughout the process to validate the solution and avoid assumptions.
This 6 steps process has various methods to use at each stage. For this exercise, I have used a few of those methods due to having time limitations and to keep it short.
Take a look at my design process below:
Things to Learn
As a first step, I started writing down on a higher level some of the things that I wanted to learn from the users.
- How this current system of demand and supply works?
- How milk plays an important role in people’s daily life?
- What are the sources people buy milk from?
- What is the buying pattern “quantity, frequency or timing”?
- What time do they consume or buy milk (morning/evening)?
- How do they like to make payments?
- What other milk products they use?
- Are they having any pain points/ struggles regarding the purchase or the product?
Picking Users for Interviews
To conduct a research study picking the right set of users plays a very important role. At this stage, I decided to define some fictional personas to proceed ahead with research activity as follows:
Fictional personas for the interviews:
- A working professional, who lives alone and requires milk every morning before leaving the office.
- A married person who lives with the family and requires milk every morning for the kids and other members at home.
There are various personas could have been defined here, but I kept limited to only 2 to save time in the research study.
User Research
The next step was to learn about the things from the users that I had defined earlier. There are various research methods could have been applied here, but the qualitative research helps in understanding user’s mental model, needs, goals, pain paints, motivations, behaviours and technical ability through observation techniques.
I decided to set up a design workshop at the office so that I could find some similar users to the defined fictional persona. I prepared the research script & questionnaire and could manage to interview 3 users in-person.
This entire planning, research activity and data collection took quite a good amount of time.
I used Optimal Workshop for the research activity. Here you can view the Interview script and questionnaire using below card/link.
Introduction Script for the User Research Study:
Insights From Research
The overall research study was around “How do people arrange milk and milk products for their daily needs” that helped me to empathise with users their mental model, struggle & pain points and to uncover most of the unknown facts are as follows:
- Almost every user is biased with some specific milk brands due to having strong trust that has been developed over time. They are not willing to make a change unless there is a strong reason.
- Most of the users prefer to buy milk every day from their nearest vendor due to quick delivery and availability.
- Users those are working / living alone are comfortable buying milk using online sources due to lack of time.
- Users those are living with family prefer to buy milk in the morning. On the other side users, those are living alone prefer to buy milk in the evening after reaching home. Not a fixed pattern.
- There is one dedicated person in the family, who takes responsibility of buying milk. That creates a dependency for others.
- Most of the users prefer cash for the offline purchase and many users prefer Paytm as an online or Pay on Delivery payment modes due to having an option of tracking expenses.
- Every user has different quantity buying pattern due to having a different number of family members.
- Most of the users like to buy/consume other milk products every morning during breakfast.
- Most of the users are unsatisfied with their current vendor in case of unavailability of milk or preferred brand or delay.
- Most of the users are not likely to compromise on the delivery time.
Empathy Map:
Further, I wanted to define empathy map to describe what users’ says, thinks, does, feels. That helps in defining real user personas, but due to time limitations, I am skipping this step for now and will define in details later when I’ll get some spare time.
Defining Pain Points
Based on the research study insights these are the major points:
- Buying milk for daily need is a repeated task, which takes time and effort.
- No expenses tracking possibilities.
- No choices of multiple payments options.
- Unavailability creates frustration.
- Delivery charges on regular buying create the possibility of exploring alternates.
- No delivery time flexibility.
- No prior notification in case of unavailability or delay delivery.
- No scope of immediate cancellation, in case of the person is not available.
- No higher range of other desired dairy products to buy.
- Low scope of quick and timely delivery.
- No scope of product quality reviews.
Ideation
At this stage, we collect lots of interesting ideas through the brainstorming session with the team members. At this moment, unfortunately, I didn’t have that scope. So I decided to come up with 1 best idea to draw paper sketches and improvise it later after taking users’ feedback and during the low-fidelity wire-framing stage.
Idea:
I came up with a subscription-based post-paid model. Where users have complete freedom to make choices of quantity, frequency, delivery type, time and payment options along with immediate cancellation and expenses tracking. Which is quite similar to the users’ existing mental model and would have higher chances of the acceptability.
Job Stories:
Before moving ahead with the initial paper concept we use job story framework to uncover the jobs to be done by the users. This is a powerful way to facilitate team conversation and discovery during the design thinking process. This framework is originally developed by Alan Klement and meant to focus on the context, causality and motivations. I am skipping this step for now since this mostly requires a team effort.
Initial Paper Concept:
User Journey — V1.0:
Explore Products > Make a Choice > View Product Details > Make a Decision > Checkout > Add Delivery Address > Choose Delivery Type > Choose Delivery Time > Confirm Choice > Verify Mobile Number > Make Payment > Delivery Status
Low-fidelity Wireframes:
Before moving ahead with low-fidelity wireframes, I decided to quickly test paper concept sketches with some users to capture their valuable feedback is listed below. I have implemented these feedbacks during the low-fidelity wireframes designing using Sketch App.
- The delivery address should be upfront to save efforts in case of services not available to any particular location.
- Exploring all the products in a single category would be a case for most of the users.
- Can we add product relevant information?
- How can we make mobile verification quick since it’s breaking users’ flow?
User Journey — V2.0:
Explore Products > Make a Choice > View Product Details > Make a Decision > Checkout > Add Delivery Address > Choose Delivery Type > Choose Delivery Time > Confirm Choice > Verify Mobile Number > Make Payment > Delivery Status
Prototype created on InVision:
Usability Testing
Task Scenario:
Usability testing is a task-driven exercise, where the usability analyst narrates a scenario to the tester to help him to get into that situation to perform the given task.
Scenario: You buy milk daily for your family to fulfil everyday needs like making morning tea and coffee. This is a part of your daily job, which makes your family always dependent on you. Recently one of your friend has suggested an app that delivers dairy products at your doorstep with various customer friendly options.
Task: Now you have to buy Amul milk using this app to accomplish your regular task of buying milk. Your current location is “The BPTP Resort”.
Instructions:
Instructions are mandatory for the 1st time users those are not familiar to the usability testing exercise to avoid unexpected behaviours and fulfil the purpose.
Do’s:
- Please think-aloud whatever thoughts are coming to your mind while performing this task.
- Please try to complete this task as soon as you can, there is no time restriction.
- Please share wherever the difficulty you find in the flow, once your task is completed.
Don’ts:
- Facilitator / observer won’t help you in this task. Because in the real scenario there is no one will help the user as well.
User testing video:
Conclusion / Learning
Post-testing conclusion and learning will be described here
Imp. Note:- This is a 1st draft of the Case Study. The final version is required few updates in various sections and will be published soon.
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